Jamie tried to ignore what he was seeing or justify it by telling himself that the feds were just doing what was necessary to restore order, and questioning their tactics was not part of his job description. Yet when he later interviewed some of the people that had been arrested, he began to realize that the majority of them were not dangerous criminals but ordinary American citizens just trying to survive the chaos.
His job was clear: decide if the people he was interviewing were to be placed in regular prisons for indefinite terms or be reeducated to accept the new order. He was not empowered to consider if they were guilty or innocent of any crimes that might have been charged with. That was not his job because they were all considered to be guilty. Jamie had heard about the concept of due process of law provided in the Constitution but had been taught that it was meaningless in a progressive society where obedience to the government was imperative and the feds decided who were friends and who were enemies. So in effect, Jamie was the judge, jury, and potential executioner of the people that were sent to him. Many of those sent to prison instead of reeducation camps did not survive for long. They were tortured, starved to death, or just outright executed.
Jamie had received a thorough indoctrination from the government about the ways that this new order would benefit everyone. Yet now he was having some serious misgivings about what he was witnessing. He was beginning to wonder if his father and mother had been right all along, and what Jamie had considered their radical conspiracy theories had not been crazy after all. He continued to do his work for the government, but his concerns would not go away. Especially when he saw more and more men, women, and even children being arrested for crimes that only involved refusing to obey government edicts or even just saying something that was critical of the government.
He ultimately made the mistake of confiding his concerns to his best friend and roommate, Frank Madison, who was a longtime resident of New Orleans and had started Tulane University with Jamie. Frank listened to what Jamie had to say and then told him that he was seeing the same things and having the same concerns. The next day Jamie was arrested and charged with being an enemy of the state. As he was led out of the dorm by the federal police, he was horrified to see Frank shaking hands with the federal agent in charge. He had been betrayed.
He remembers little about what occurred after that. There was no trial. He was evaluated by federal authorities and sent to the detention center where he was drugged and put to work for the state.
Chapter VI
Now that Jamie’s memory was back, he was determined to help Ray and his team escape, so he could join them in the fight to restore freedom in America. He also hoped, although he knew it was a long shot, that he might find his family—if they were still alive. He owed them a major apology.
He spent the next several weeks watching the area surrounding the Marriott. His captors were confident that Jamie was under their complete control and would do nothing but what he was told to do. They were sure that he was simply a human robot who was no longer capable of independent thought. He was part of a crew that was taken by guards every morning to the Marriott. They were checked in with the area guard post on Canal Street and then were then left to their own work until the evening. The government did not have enough personnel to assign a guard to each inmate or even a crew of inmates.
So every evening at dusk, the inmates were programmed to report back to the guard post and were then accompanied by a single guard back to the detention center. This was not because the feds were afraid inmates might try to escape but because many of them were so heavily drugged that they might simply get lost if left to find the detention center on their own. However, the guard just walked the inmates to within side of the main gate and left. That was how Jamie was able to sneak the flag through the fence at the blind spot found by Ray.
During his time alone in and around the Marriott, Jamie was able to mentally record the times that the regular patrols went through that area of the French Quarter. The patrols usually consisted of five heavily armed men, and they always took the same routes at three-hour intervals. Few people still lived in the French Quarter because homes, hotels, and apartment buildings had been heavily damaged during the looting and riots a few years earlier. However, some high-ranking government officials occupied the luxury homes and apartments that had survived and could be restored. The patrols were there to protect them.
Since Jamie was only in the area during the day, he could only assume that the patrols operated in the same way at night. If that was, in fact, the case, he could lead Ray and the other men successfully to the building where the weapons were stashed without encountering the enemy. Then the problem would be finding a way to transport the weapons and the men. There were abandoned vehicles throughout the area, but they had been disabled by the EMP attack and could not be started. Even if they could be fired up, the fuel had long ago been removed for use in vehicles that could run.
There were many running vehicles at the district headquarters of the federal police, but it would be virtually impossible to steal any of them. However, Jamie had found another possibility. Prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the city of New Orleans had a population of almost 500,000 people. That had been reduced significantly after the hurricane, but by 2015 the population had rebounded to around 369,000. However, the combination of the EMP and the subsequent riots had caused thousands of people to flee and thousands more to be killed. Now the population had been reduced to just over 50,000 and approximately 10,000 of those people were prisoners of the federal government.
Most of the other people either worked for the government or had at least sworn allegiance to the government. They all had to be fed, and the new government’s system of collective farms set up around the state could not begin to meet the needs of the city. Thus, food was heavily rationed, particularly to both the general population and the inmates in the detention center.
Much of the food was imported from Mexico and countries in Central and South America and was brought to the port of New Orleans by small ships that used less fuel than large container ships. The food was offloaded and stored in a large building on the Mississippi River that had been built in 1891 and once been the home of the Jackson beer brewery. Now it was a warehouse for food. The best of the food went to government bosses; and the rest was distributed to the federal police, the general population, and the detention center for the inmates.
The food was transported around the city in a fleet of unmarked vans. The vans were not marked since if the population knew that there was food in them they would often be hijacked despite the fact that an armed guard rode with each of the vehicles. Jamie knew that if Ray and his team could steal several of these vans from the motor pool next to the warehouse, they could transport the escaping men and the weapons they had secured.
This was just one part of the plan since the group then had to get out of the city. Driving out would be almost impossible since while most of the men were locals and knew the streets, they had no way of knowing where patrols or checkpoints might be set up. Therefore, Jamie was also assigned to check the Mississippi River for a large boat that could be stolen and that could take the men and weapons upriver in the dead of night.
There were many tugboats and fishing vessels tied up to the wharfs at night, but the tugs posed several problems. First, they had crews onboard twenty-four hours per day, so the boats would be on call to assist ships coming into the port day or night. Secondly, a tug could not move without specific permission of the harbor master and would be easily spotted and monitored.
The fishing boats were different. The crews did not work for the government. They were able to come and go at will. When they returned with a catch, the captains had to check in with the harbormaster, and two-thirds of their catch was taken by the government. They were allowed to sell the other third at the farmer’s market in the French Quarter. That was the way they made their livelihood. The normal ro
utine was for a boat to sail from New Orleans downriver into the Gulf and spend several days fishing.
It would then return to the city with its catch, and the crew would spend a day or two with their families onshore before going out again. No one stayed onboard, and when they did sail, it was often late at night. That meant they would be perfect for Ray’s escape plan. The flaw was that there was no normal schedule followed, so Jamie had to identify more than one possibility. It took several weeks of observation, but he finally found three large fishing boats that would fit their needs, and at least one of them would be available on any given night they chose for the escape.
Chapter VII
The plan was starting to come together, but it was a clearly a long shot because of all the elements involved. First, the group the Ray Thibodeaux had put together was housed in three separate facilities in the detention center. They would therefore have to orchestrate three separate escapes from three separate locations. Then they would have to get out of the center, avoid the French Quarter patrols, and steal several vehicles from the old Jackson brewery, retrieve the weapons, proceed undetected to the wharf, and steal a fishing boat. It seemed like an impossible task, but the men of Ray’s team were willing to risk all to escape the federal prison and rejoin the fight for their country.
Then Mother Nature intervened. Many of the prison guards were from Syria, brought in to reinforce the Americans who had turned on their country. They spoke Arabic and believed that no one else could understand them. However, since Ray had been a Green Beret, he had been required to learn a second language, in his case, Arabic. Thus, one August day he heard some Syrian guards discussing the fact that a hurricane was approaching New Orleans.
The forecasting was not as accurate as it used to be when the sophisticated computers were online, but basic radar was still operating, and it showed a category 3 storm coming toward the city from the southeast Gulf of Mexico. It was expected to hit the city directly in two days in the early morning hours. Winds in a cat 3 storm would range from 111 to 130 miles per hour with higher gusts possible. The storm surge would be nine to twelve feet, so the combination of heavy rains and a rising tide in the large lakes around New Orleans would cause some flooding. It was also a sure thing that the city’s power system that relied on a combination of solar-powered and gasoline generators was iffy at best and would probably go down.
The guards were discussing that possibility and the action that was going to be taken. The detention center had backup generators that were either solar powered, gasoline powered, or a combination of the two. Regardless, they had limited gasoline and were not sure how the generators that were solar powered would perform in hurricane conditions. So the plan was to only turn on a few generators at a time. This would provide limited lighting of the compound at night, but the guards were not overly concerned since the inmates were so drugged up that escape did not enter their minds. That would allow the guards to have sufficient power to light the quarters of the guards and administrators and make sure they got hot food, regardless of how long the blackout lasted.
Ray found all this very interesting, and it could prove to be a game changer for their escape plan. One major concern Ray had always worried about was the fact that his men were housed in three separate dorms. This meant that they would have to escape from these multiple locations, meet a predetermined location, and breach the fence. The hurricane provided Ray with a plan to get everyone together in one location without having to escape from individual dorms.
With a hurricane coming in, the fields of fruit and vegetables and the animals would have to be secured and protected from the storm. Ray planned to suggest to his superior, the mess hall administrator who was a federal employee, that he would take the men who worked for him in the fields and several members of his kitchen staff to place covers over the plants and move the animals into shelters. He also strongly suggested that he and his men and the guard assigned to them spend the night in the tool shed that was a solid brick structure and should survive the storm. That way, they could monitor the plants and animals during the storm and resolve any problems that might occur. He believed that this idea would be accepted because of the importance of fresh food to the administrators of the prison.
The second major concern for Ray was the fact that while they could steal vehicles and transport the weapons to the boat on the river, they would need to return the vehicles to their original location, but he was afraid that someone would note that a boat was missing before Ray and his men could get to their intended destination. The hurricane could solve that problem. Instead of returning the vehicles, they could be driven into the river. The missing boat would probably initially be attributed to the storm. The logical assumption would be that it had torn loose from its moorings and either sunk in the turbulent river or run aground somewhere downstream. A search for it would not be a priority in the aftermath of a major hurricane.
On the other hand, once it was discovered that some inmates were missing from the prison and that several federal vehicles were also missing, a search would be launched for the vehicles. That would be a good diversion for the team since hopefully no one would connect the escaped inmates to a boat torn from its moorings during a storm. Of course, making it upriver in a fishing boat during a hurricane would not be an easy task, but the winds would be at their back, and one of the members of Ray’s crew had been a chief boatswain’s mate in the Coast Guard and later an accomplished ship’s pilot on the Mississippi River. If anyone could successfully maneuver a boat up the river during a hurricane, it would be Jason Arnaud, a short swarthy Cajun originally from Ville Platte, Louisiana.
The detention center’s administrators readily agreed to Ray’s plan to protect their food supply. The plan was now in place, and over the next twenty-four hours all the members of Ray’s crew were notified of the final version of the plan. The next day they were all moved to the fields to prepare the plants and animals to survive the hurricane. The exception was Jamie. He had never been assigned to this type of work, and if Ray were to request his presence now, it might raise suspicion, so Jamie went out to do his usual duties and signed in at the guard post near the Marriott at the end of his shift. Then when the guard escorted the men within sight of the detention center and left them, Jamie slipped away to hide in a nearby park where he would be joined later by Ray and the rest of the men.
It was correctly assumed that with the hurricane approaching, the guards at the detention center would not have time to launch a search for a single man who had probably just been disoriented and wandered off. They believed if he survived the storm, they would soon find him after the storm had passed. However, the rest of the plan ran into trouble.
Ray and his crew that cared for the gardens and animals were usually accompanied by a single guard every day. This was because while other inmates were believed to be taking the mind-altering drugs, Ray had been allowed to stop taking them. The prison administrators wanted Ray to be at his best when preparing their meals and did not want him to forget their favorite recipes. They were not aware that he had stopped taking them long before he received their permission.
They trusted Ray but could not afford to be found negligent in their duties, so a guard was always assigned, and it was usually the same guard: an amicable heavyset white former truck driver named John Magee, who had sworn allegiance to the new government and taken the only job available to him, that of prison guard. He and Ray had become friendly, and this bothered Ray because he knew that John would have to be killed and his body hidden to cover the escape for as long as possible. A plan was already in place to have Magee overpowered during the storm and killed.
On the day that the storm was scheduled to roll into New Orleans, Ray and his men prepared to move outside of the main compound and into the gardens, but they were shocked to learn that there were two more armed guards assigned to accompany Magee. He recognized both of them as men who usually guarded the barrack
s where Ray, Jamie, and three other men in the unit were housed. Now Ray’s crew would have to kill three guards in order to make their escape. It was not impossible but would be considerably more dangerous, and the whole plan could fail.
As they went about their work of covering the plants in plastic and staking the plastic down, as well as moving the animals into prepared shelters, Ray spoke to all of them about how they could execute the taking out of the three guards and their ultimate escape. However, they never needed to execute the plan, which was supposed to occur as they were being escorted to the shelter after completing their work.
Although the full force of the storm was not due to hit the city until after midnight, the outer bands of wind and rain from the storm started coming in during midafternoon. Ray and his crew had started work early in the morning, but with several thousand plants and animals to be protected, it was tedious work. By the time the winds started increasing and the rain was pouring down in the afternoon, much of the work had been completed, but it was dusk before everything necessary had been done.
Now the critical moment had arrived for Ray’s men to attempt to overpower the guards and initiate the escape plan. The inmates were lined up to be taken to the shelter when something unexpected happened. Sergeant Magee took Ray aside and had a lengthy conversation with him. After that conversation, Ray approached his men and gave them a one-word command: abort. This command was unexpected and disturbing to the men to say the least, but they all trusted Ray completely so they had no choice but to obey.
Once inside of the of the brick building where they were protected from the howling wind and rain, Ray revealed to his group what Sergeant Magee had told him. Magee had stated that he was a patriot that had been forced to become a guard because his wife of thirty years was seriously ill. Medical treatment of any kind, and especially medication, was severely limited when it came to the regular population and was in short supply even for employees of the federal government. The best was reserved for the bosses, but since Magee knew that he could get at least some treatment for his wife as a federal guard, he took the opportunity.
The Rag Page 3